As part of the development of a national high frequency (HF) radar network for ocean surface current mappingwithin the context of the Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS), standards for data management arenecessary. The data management standards detailed here are based on high frequency radar communityrecommendations and best practices as well as the recommendations of the NOAA Data ManagementIntegration Team. These are existing standards that can be adopted and applied to HF radar surface currentdata. The topics addressed here, in accordance with the Data Integration Framework (DIF) Team, are: 1) DataAccess and Transport, 2) Metadata and 3) Data Quality Control.There are three levels of HF radar (HFR) data: Doppler spectra, radial velocities, and gridded total vectorvelocities. The national HF radar data server currently ingests raw radial velocity data from nearly 100 radarsites spread throughout the coastal US and combines them to form gridded surface current total vector velocitydata.The focus of this document is the gridded total velocity data fields, although the other, lower-level, data typesand their metadata are also described. These gridded data will be hosted by a NOAA Data Assembly Centerand delivered to users as a three-dimensional grid with dimensions of latitude, longitude, time. DMACrecommendedmetadata standards for the gridded data are described in detail.Synthesized here, also, are results from several NOAA IOOS-funded HFR data analyses and from HFRcommunity workshops that provide recommendations for data quality assurance and quality control.Future versions of this document will address the issues of data management and metadata for the lower-levelHFR data types. A separate document will address best practices for radar installation, operation andmaintenance. |
